121: No Such Thing As The Sword In The Carbon Fibre

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in a particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Jaczinski.

My fact this week is that the reason Merlin isn't called Merdin is to avoid confusion with a 12th century word for feces.

That's amazing.

Yeah, so the wizard Merlin of Sword and the Stone fame, he would have been called Merdin.

And so the story is that Merlin was originally created in the form we know him by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was a sort of a Norman Welsh guy in the 12th century.

And he based the character of Merlin on this Welsh medieval mythical figure called Merdin, M-Y-R-D-D-I-N.

But because he has sort of Norman origins, because he was from the nobility probably, and so a lot of people were speaking French in his social circles, it was thought that Merdin would be really easily confused with Merd, which is the same as it is today, which is the word for poo.

Feels like he's missed a chance for a lot of puns and and poo jokes, doesn't it?

By changing that name, he's lost a lot of his joke material.

Yes,

yeah, he could have been the chaucer of his time.

Yeah, I just don't know if that was the style he was going for.

Okay, do you know that in the 17th century, the word merd was English?

Yes, it's weird, isn't it?

It was just a common English word for poo, merd, and then it just kind of disappeared in the 18th century, and now it's kind of everyone knows it's just a French word.

Speaking of people whose names meant

feces,

Montezuma of the Aztecs

had a nephew whose name meant plenty of excrement.

What was his name?

It was Cuirajuac.

Yeah.

And they have they had guacamole, didn't they?

Which means

testicle source.

Source.

Testicle sauce, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

And avocado means testicles as well.

Exactly, yes.

Other things that mean testicles?

Orchid.

Orchid, yes.

I have another Merlin fact, probably my favourite Merlin fact.

He was sorted into a house at Hogwarts.

Neither of these things is real.

Exactly.

I thought someone might pick me up on this, but neither of these things are real.

So on Pottermoor, the big J.K.

Rowling website, it was revealed that Merlin was a student of the School of Hogwarts, and he was sorted into one of the four schools, and he was sorted into Slytherin.

So Merlin is a Slytherin.

Wow.

This is weird because you said yesterday that you'd found an amazing thing on Merlin that you love.

It's the best thing I've ever found, yeah.

Well, so I was reading about him later on, and I found something, and I thought, oh, I bet this is what Dan's found.

It's so interesting.

And this really shows how disconnected you and I are.

Because

the thing I thought is that

he's so Merlin in the original myths is alleged to have been buried in this particular place at sort of a crossover between two rivers, so the River Tweed and a little stream called Powsail Burn.

And in the legends, it was written that

if ever the Powsail and the Tweed were to meet at the place of Merlin's final resting place, as in if these two rivers were to suddenly collide, then England and Scotland would have the same monarch.

And this prediction is in medieval text.

And on the exact day that James VI of Scotland and James I of England was crowned in 1603, the banks of the River Tweed broke and it flooded into the Powsail Burn and they met.

No.

Isn't that weird?

I smell PR happening here.

It might be that I didn't check how often the banks broke, and it might be that they just broke every single winter, but I definitely know they broke in 1603 on that precise day.

According to whom?

A 17th-century Malcolm Tucker character.

Speaking of PR, though, I was talking to Greg Jenner, and Greg Jenner, who's been on our show a number of times.

Historian.

Historian, Horrible History's official chief nerd.

And he was telling me about a publicity stunt as well.

So this was back in the 12th century.

The Glastonbury Abbey burned down, and all the pilgrims stopped going to it.

So, it was soon after that that the abbot found the body of King Arthur in his grave, and suddenly all the pilgrims started returning en masse.

And so, Greg was saying that this is one of the earliest examples of a publicity stunt where they just needed people to return.

So, King Arthur is one of the original publicity stunts.

Yeah, I think what happened was it burned down, and they were like to Henry II, oh, can we have some more money to build it?

And he's like, Oh, we don't have any, but maybe, just maybe, if you look closely, you might be able to find the body of King Arthur.

And they went, Okay, we'll have a look.

And sure enough, the very next day, they found it.

Oh, wow,

what a weird coincidence!

And it took such a short time as well.

Incredible.

Okay, so this is something that I thought you would like, Dan.

So, the Holy Grail,

which is kind of an Arthurian legend as well.

It's based probably on an adaptation of an old Welsh story about the cauldron of Anwyn, okay, which was owned by a guy called Bran the Blessed.

No, yeah, And he was a giant, a Welsh giant called Bran the Blessed.

And if you go onto his Wikipedia page, it says, do not confuse him with Brian Blessed.

That's amazing.

You can understand why you would.

Yeah.

That's incredible.

Do we know any more about him, or is it?

Well, there's all sorts on his Wikipedia page, but I didn't read any of it.

And he was real, was he?

No, he was a giant.

Oh, my God.

But then, is Brian Blessed real, really?

That's the point.

That's the point I'm making.

Who appears more real?

Also, do you know what the name of the sword and the stone was?

I'm going to say Excalibur, and you're looking at me like it's wrong.

It's wrong, I'm afraid.

According to Mallory and according to basically everyone, the sword of the stone doesn't have a name, and then Arthur loses it, and then he gets Escalibur from the Lady of the Lake, which is a different sword,

who eventually traps Merlin for all of eternity.

That's how Merlin meets his demise.

It was in some stone as well, right?

Yeah.

Everything's always been stuck in stone in these days.

Yeah, they didn't have

stone fiber, they didn't have plastics, they had to use what they had, basically, and all their hair was stoned.

Actually, just on Arthurian legend, I think, I don't know if Andy will know this, but I had no idea about this, and I thought it was really interesting.

So, Arthurian legends are referred to as the Matter of Britain.

So, this is this whole body of medieval literature, which is called the Matter of Britain.

And there are three matters in medieval times: there's the Matter of Britain, the Matter of France, and the Matter of Rome.

And these are just the three big bits of literature.

So, Matter of Britain is Arthur, the Matter of France is the

stories of Charlemagne.

And the Matter of Rome is like all awesome Roman ancient literature.

So the Matter of Rome is absolutely winning.

And the guy who named these was a French poet who was called Baudel.

And I was thinking when I was reading this, oh, cool, we are one of the three great tripods of medieval literature.

And his description of them was that France is characterized, the matter of France is characterized by voir or truth.

Rome is characterized by sageness or wisdom or knowledge.

And the matter of Britain is characterized by being vain et pleasant to mean frivolous, pleasant, but completely false.

Funny you say wise because that's where the word wizard comes from.

Is it?

Yeah.

Wow.

The wiz pap comes from wise.

And I think the idea was that maybe in the olden days wise people could see the future.

I think that might be it.

Okay.

Can I quickly talk about modern-day wizards?

Yeah.

Okay.

So

pagans and druids, those are the sort of modern-day torch holders of the whole wizarding world, I would say.

And interesting news in the world of pagan news, which is that now pagans, there's about a million in the UK, 300 of whom are in prison, prisoned pagans, prisoned wizards, are now allowed to have a wand in jail.

That's a new ruling that's just been made because it's respecting their religious beliefs.

So, what they have to do is they can go into the yard and get some twigs and bring them back, and then they kind of just pimp up the twigs a bit, and then that's their wand that they're allowed to have.

I think I might start a new religion which has a skeleton key as a holy

symbol.

This article says they've toned down all of the rituals because what they're also in theory should be having is a flaming torch with them as part of the religion.

And they've said, we're cool to let the flaming torch bit go.

We can have the twigs.

How many wizards are in prison?

300.

300?

Yeah.

Are they all in the same religion?

No, it's not.

I don't actually think it does show respect for their religion because what basically you're saying when you tell wizards that they're allowed to have their wand in prison is that you definitely don't believe their wand has any capacity to help them whatsoever.

I have one last thing, which is about modern-day wizards, which is there is a school in California which is open and it's been open for 10 years.

It's the world's only registered wizard academy.

It's got 735 students,

half of whom will be in prison in 10 years.

And

it was set up by a guy called Oberon Zell Ravenhart, and he himself is a wizard.

But the school is up and running.

You can go to their website.

They have latest news is that the school is now, it's called the Grey School of Wizardry.

They're now on Second Life, so you can attend it on Second Life as well.

They have a list of their staff.

It includes people called Silvermane, Swift Rabbit, Frogs Dancing, Earth Drum, MA, Apollionis, BS, MS, PhD.

BS is a bit odd.

And Silverlock.

And so, yeah, you can you can.

So all these people just they started out as accountants or postmen and they got so much mockery for their names that they ended up being forced into the wizarding profession, do you think?

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know who does it.

One more modern wizard who's great is the real King Arthur who's back.

This is a guy who was formerly called John Rothwell before he realised that he was King Arthur a few years ago.

He's the battle chieftain of the Council of British Druid Orders.

There was quite a good interview with him in Vice, and the Vice guy asked him things like, How hard was it to pull the sword from the stone?

to which he answered, Very, very, very hard.

Sounds legit.

They tried to trick him with that trick question,

but he got it straight away.

Not today.

Oh, hang on, hang on.

The whole point of the sword in the stone was that it comes out easily if you're the king of England.

They did trick him.

They did trick him.

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Okay, and it's time to move on to fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that tea leaves sometimes flow upstream from the cup to the pot.

I don't believe it.

If I I was ever going to call nonsense on anything, never mind King Arthur being reincarnated.

This sounds amazing.

It is incredible.

It was discovered by

a guy called Sebastian Bianchini in 2008.

He was at the University of Havana and he was pouring hot water from a pot which was just water into a cup which had some tea leaves, some matte tea leaves.

And as he poured it, he had his nice cup of tea and then he looked in the pot and there were tea leaves there and he didn't understand why.

And he went to a physicist at the University of of Havana, and they kind of did some experiments.

But then they kind of never published the findings because they thought everyone would laugh at them.

But it seems true.

It seems like it's a real thing.

Hang on, if you, this is one of those things that you could actually demonstrate.

Like, you could just demonstrate it.

Why would people laugh?

But they think probably it was a trick, and he had some tea leaves in there all along.

So, like a Darren Brown style.

You'd never be able to make any tea.

Because the leaves would constantly be fleeing into the pot.

So it's not all of them, it's some of them.

And it's due to this thing called the Marangoni effect which is a mixture of surface tension and a little bit of capillary action and surface tension basically we're talking about pure water and not pure water and the particles want to travel up towards a purer water and people didn't think it could happen with something as big as tea leaves but actually it can happen.

And yeah.

How big a leaf are we talking?

We're talking this stuff is called mate tea and it's usually like little they're like almost like little bits of sawdust, aren't they?

Yeah, yeah, it's really small, it's very crumbling, smaller than normal tea leaves.

But actually, when things are on quite small scale, they can do things that don't normally happen for bigger things.

So, like, for instance, capillary action only really works for really small kind of thin tubes, which is that water goes up the tube against gravity.

And that wouldn't happen on a normal tube, but it happens with very thin tubes, and that's how plants can get the water from the ground into the leaves.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Did you read the guy guy who commented, someone who commented at the bottom of this study?

And he said, This article reminded me of when I once made the mistake of expectorating into a toilet, and the result was an immediate acrid taste in my mouth.

Apparently, the chemicals in there had travelled several feet up my stream of saliva.

But

that was a theory that

it is quite disgusting, but the scientists acknowledged that that could be a possibility, although they said that it might be quite unlikely that chemicals could flow that way backwards.

So, are we saying that when you go to the loo, in some some ways, the loo goes to you?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's not very much, it's not all of it.

It's not like you come out of the toilet and the toilet is completely empty of water.

I'm so bloated after that.

Well, isn't there that thing that all men are scared of, that Amazonian fish, where the rumour's always been that it will swim up your urine?

We should quickly explain that, shouldn't we?

It's a kandiru, it's like a mini little catfish.

I think it's in the catfish family.

And the theory is you would be in the water and you'd be urinating and it gets attracted to the urine stream and then it follows it and then goes into your penis and sticks its spines out and gets stuck there and can be extremely painful.

And there's been one or two stories in the medical literature of it happening, but most people think probably it's not true.

Yeah, and I have to say, you say a little fish.

I've seen one in the Natural History Museum.

That's not a little fish.

That is.

Remember when we went to.

Yeah, that was...

I mean, no, but that's big.

Like, it's not not like you know that whale in the in the front lobby yeah it wasn't that one okay then I misread the label but no it's about an inch or two yeah I know but still the idea of that going a up a stream which you know it's not it's it's like a it's like a teapot stream yeah it's not a thick well mine's not like a thick

this was apparently the only means of preventing it according to one piece of nineteenth century medical literature because this rumour's been around for about 200 years that they'll do this the only means of preventing it from reaching your bladder, where it causes inflammation and ultimately death, is to instantly amputate the penis.

This isn't when you get your visa to go to the Amazon.

You have to have it done.

As a preventative.

Yes.

Just a shot in your arm, and

let's just get that off, shall we?

I'm pretty sure that this has completely been debunked as an idea.

The Kandiru.

Going from you standing on the bank and having a pit.

So the idea is it could, let's say, it could possibly happen while you're bathing

perhaps, and it just follows the warmth of the water or whatever.

But the idea that you're standing on the side of a river, peeing down, and then it jumps like a salmon into your penis,

I'm pretty sure that God is.

I was reading about the first ever book written about tea.

It's an old Chinese text, and it's the first ever collection of a book on tea.

It's called Cha Ching.

It genuinely is.

Cha, the Chinese word, and Qing, which I actually don't know what that word is, but...

Oh, but the I Ching is a fortune-telling book, isn't it?

Yes, okay.

Oh, yeah, maybe it was fortune-telling through T.

Lu's book.

You know, India, what the mythology of how tea came about in India is?

What?

Did it get found by a goat herd, or is that coffee, maybe?

No, so it was about 1,900 years ago, and it was a priest named Bodhiadharma, and

he was trying to connect with Zen Buddhism, and the idea that he was going to do that was seven years sleepless contemplation of Buddha.

He found himself in the fifth year getting quite drowsy

and needed to cure that.

And so he quickly grabbed some leaves off a tree and started chewing on them.

And he thought, this is fantastic.

And that just got him through that extra two years.

It really perked him up for that final push.

And in China, they have an idea that it was an emperor called Nun Xian, who was,

as well as being the emperor, who's a scholar and herbalist.

And while he was out in the field on maybe, I guess, a walk or something, he was having a hot cup of water, and some leaves blew into his cup, and he smelt it and went, Oh, that smells quite nice.

I love it.

It's so interesting.

Pretty much everything has an origin myth where it's discovered by

the teacher.

It's so bugbear, isn't it?

It just seems to be that humans have this innate preference for that kind of discovery rather than someone who really knew what they were doing and had studied the field and was working really hard on it for years.

Because we all want to believe that we could do it.

So, the British introduced tea to India, which sounds lunatic.

Or rather they popularised it in India.

So uh it was already native, but it was not a thing that was grown in large quantities, though it wasn't big.

But then uh in the nineteenth century Britain needed an alternative to the Chinese tea monopoly.

And so that's why India is now this great tea nation.

'Cause we got it in the seventeenth century, I think.

Was it Charles II's wife, I think, came over and brought tea?

And then everyone thought it was like this terrible well, there was a lot of misogyny and xenophobia.

Basically, it It was a foreign thing that women drank.

And also, it gave women a reason for getting together, and men obviously thought that was a terrible thing.

It's the Lambrini of its day, basically.

Lambrini was discovered, actually, when

a man was walking across a field with some carbonated water.

And a passing bird dropped a rotting grape into it.

So, can I just bring it back to your main headline fact for a second?

So, you haven't seen a video of this being done?

No.

I couldn't find one.

Surely we should be doing that.

We should be filming that or getting someone listening to like, let's see this.

Let's see.

Okay, so it's specifically mate tea, which is this South American tea, which is

quite a big thing over there, isn't it?

You've been to Massa.

Yeah, and I've got a few friends who live there, and it's pretty much all they do.

I'm amazed to get any work done there.

But yeah, there's a really strict ritual around mate tea, which is that the way you drink it is you fill up a kettle of boiling water and then you pour it onto all these herbs and you keep on topping it up and up, so you can keep drinking your one mate tea for hours.

But two very important things you have to do, and people get extremely angry if you don't do them.

It's usually you hand it around, so it's a real sociable thing, it's a very much a community thing drinking mate.

And when you hand it to someone, you have to look them in the eye because that's part of your saying, I'm giving this to you.

And you have to give it to them with a straw pointing towards them.

So it comes with this metal straw.

And if you don't give it to them with a straw pointing, you are

kicked out of the country.

No, that sounds like it's from bitter experience.

Just on tea, so I think a lot of people think that you shouldn't re-boil a kettle.

If you boil the water once, you should use that to make tea, and then the water's sort of no good for making tea after that.

And if you re-boil it, it's bad.

And the theory is that all the oxygen leaches out of the water.

But the thing is, when you boil a kettle, it leaches off the first time you boil a kettle.

So whenever you make a tea, you don't have a choice.

You have to make it without all that lovely bonus oxygen.

oxygen.

Oh, okay.

Do you know what I do now?

If I have a shirt that needs ironing, I start boiling a kettle, and as it reaches boiling point, I take the lid off, and all the steam comes up.

But because you've taken the lid off, it never fully boils.

So, the kettle's confused, it thinks it's still boiling, so it keeps going.

So, I steam my entire shirt, and it steams really quickly.

You can do a whole shirt in about a minute.

I haven't done it on my shirt today.

I'm so shirt.

It's so greased today.

Listening at home, Dan is massive with one wrinkle now, basically.

Why don't we put tea bags in the kettle as it boils?

That's always confused me.

Because someone might want coffee.

Why would you put tea bags in the kettle?

Because I noticed that the British love to leave in a pot tea and let it mull.

And I reckon the intense boiling that's going on would absolutely make it just the most intense tea.

You could rewrite the book on tea.

You could be cha-ching the sequel.

There was a famous quote by Einstein where he said that his best ever idea was to

put an egg in his soup while it was cooking so that his egg and his soup could cook at the same time.

See, me and Einstein are on the same

thinking level here.

Except you're shoving a shirt into a kettle that's just got a tea leg in it.

Over it.

Over it.

I'm holding it over.

All Dad needs in his house is one kettle and it does everything.

If I need to make some toast, I just put it in the kettle.

I don't need a hot water bottle.

I just hug the kettle to sleep.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

And my fact this week is that butchers in ancient Egypt wore high heels.

Okay.

Yep, and I think

I'm pretty sure it's correct to say that that's the oldest example of high heels that we have in history.

Why would they wear high heels?

Because apparently it was to do with the slaughtering of the animals.

So when they were killing all the animals, they would find that the floor would be blood-drenched.

They didn't want to get their feet completely stained.

So the high heels just made it a more pleasant walking process for them.

So yeah, and but then people did wear high heels back then outside of butchers.

But I think butchers were known specifically.

That was the footwear of the job.

Yeah, wasn't you saw someone in heels and you went, oh, that's a butcher.

No, exactly.

But you might for a second think you'd make a good butcher.

Because you know how to rock those heels.

Exactly, yeah.

And men and women wore them, obviously, um, back then.

I thought that they had been invented in the ninth century, right, uh, in Persia.

Yeah, I thought that as well.

Which is where, and the reason they were invented there, I think it might have been a separate invention, was so that men could fire arrows while on horseback.

It was

Persian archers, and basically it's you if you wedge your feet into the stirrups using a pair of high heels, you can stand up in the stirrups and you can fire more steadily from there while you're riding a horse.

You know, the Persians are responsible for a huge period of terrible terrible art in Egypt.

What?

Yeah, so the Persians, the Persians took over at about 525 BC, or at least during 525 BC, they were running Egypt.

And so what they did was all the artists who were in Egypt, who were doing

all of the caskets, all the wall art and so on, they basically deported them.

So it just left Egypt with terrible artists.

And you can see all these examples, this whole period of just bad art where people are trying to now be the artists and they're just getting it really, just slightly cartoonishly wrong.

Are you sure they didn't just go there?

They wanted to give the Egyptians a bad rep, so the Persians did a whole bunch of kind of faked, really crappy drawings.

Look how bad these guys are.

They also played board games.

I didn't know that.

And Tutankhamun, there's even that period, those drawings, where you can just see them playing board games.

Really?

Yeah.

Do we know what?

Yeah, we do.

We know the names of the games.

We don't know the rules.

They still debate the exact rules over some of the games, but there's like Jackal versus Dog.

There's a game that has a name.

ultimate.

Shall we do a bit on butchers before we move on?

Yeah, sure, yeah.

So according to the Butchers Guild website that I was reading,

the earliest kind of butchery that they have was from a Florida sinkhole from 12,000 years ago, and it was a butchered giant sloth.

Whoa.

Yeah.

So it was hanging in a little shop window somewhere in a sinkhole.

How do we know it's been butchered?

I reckon they will have found bits of cutting on the bones.

Wow.

Because if you have a butchered carcass, you can see where they've cut deliberately to get this piece of meat away.

But it didn't say on the website, so I'm not 100% sure.

And also in that sinkhole, they found a sharpened stick and a tortoise.

Do we think the tortoise was the one that butchered the sloth?

Did you know?

I didn't realise that one of the theories of how Tutankhamun died was that he got eaten by a hippopotamus.

Yeah.

That's an actual thing.

No, I don't think that is right, is it?

Well, no, that he got killed by it.

He got killed, but he didn't get eaten.

Because he's buried in a very unconventional way, so he's missing his heat.

No, he's just missing his heart.

It looks like

something's committed some kind of horrific injury to him, whereby it's consumed his heart.

Unless there's something where his heart used to be saying the hippo took this.

I think he was embalmed without his heart anywhere, so usually the heart would be there and the heart was missing.

And it's obviously the obvious conclusion you jump to if the heart's missing is that a hippo took it.

What sort of freaky vampire hippo is this that can with surgical precision remove someone's heart?

Like the evil guy from Temple of Doom.

But a hippo.

This is one of the ancient Egyptian board games they play with hungry, hungry hippos.

The source does specify a handful of Egyptologists believe this.

I've seen it in a bunch of places.

Yeah, it's thought because hunting big animals like that was popular, and there are pictures of Khatun Kamuna doing things like that in his tomb.

And

it's a theory, guys.

It's like a theory.

I just have one last thing because I was reading about laundrymen of ancient Egypt.

They would take all the clothes from people's houses.

They would leave little tokens that they would draw the picture of the clothes they took and leave it with you.

So it's like, we have these items, make sure that they come back.

What did they do after all of Egypt's good artists were removed?

You couldn't tell which item they draw.

But they would go down to the Nile and they would wash all their clothes.

And one of the hazards of being a laundryman back in ancient Egypt was that it was likely that you were going to be eaten by a crocodile because they hung around on the banks so much.

They must have been delighted when kettles were invented.

You don't see any crease shirts and any hieroglyphs there.

Amazing.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

My fact is that there is a fish called the Amazonian wood-eating catfish, but it is unable to digest wood.

Okay.

It is a catfish, though.

It is a catfish, yeah.

It was discovered a few years ago, in about 2010.

And we've known for a while that there are loads of catfish which sort of suck wood.

The kandiru.

They're called sucker mouth armoured catfish, and they scrape wood with their teeth to get organic material off it.

So they like algae and bacteria and things that are found clinging to wood uh in rivers but this new fish it literally eats the wood and it die uh it digests the biological material on the wood and it living inside the wood and then it excretes the wood four hours later so it it so it has the most painful bathroom visit about twice a day is it yeah um so and it absorbs all the organic products and the tiny animals that live on the wood and it has special spoon-shaped teeth as well and it's just i think it's amazing that this thing eats wood and then gets rid of all the wood apparently um it's really hard to fish for them because they don't go for bait but that a lot of fishing rods are made out of wood so you could hold onto them

throw the

rod go the opposite way you're right yeah do you know how you do catch them you listen out for them because they make this rasping noise which is them going

on the wood that they're eating yeah but this is the weird thing we can't digest wood

but i think the reason for this, I may be wrong about this, but I think it is that we don't have organisms in our gut which produce the enzyme cellulase, right?

So wood pulp is cellulose, and if you have the enzyme cellulase, you can digest it.

So my question is, if we did inject somebody with those organisms, which do produce cellulase, would we be able to digest treatment?

I think you would.

You'd be able to do it just in like a probiotic.

You wouldn't have to inject it into anyone.

Why have we done this?

I bet you've got, you know, those gross-looking smoothies you sometimes bring into the office.

I bet they're cellulose in one of those.

Try chewing on a twig after that.

I think really you could do, but actually, it's easier to get the calories out of a cream cake than it is to get it out of a stick, even if you do have cellulose.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Is there any species of tree that we do eat?

I know broccoli is not a tree, but it kind of looks like one.

But we did used to eat bark.

Didn't we?

Well, our ancestors used to eat bark.

So they discovered this quite recently.

So gorillas and also chimps sometimes chew on bark.

Okay, so our really far back ancestors.

Super far before humans were actually a thing.

It was another hominid.

I think it was the Astralopithecus sediba, which is a two-million year old ancestor of humans.

And they recently found some with bark stuck in its teeth.

And so yeah, we used to chew on that.

This is another toot and karmoon hippo heart mystery, isn't it?

That sounds more like they invented the toothpick.

What a brilliant rival theory.

You should write to the archaeologists.

Some tribes might use sticks for cleaning their teeth, wouldn't they?

I think they have things you can chew on.

Yeah.

Isn't cinnamon made out of bark?

Cinnamon sticks.

Don't we get aspirin from powdered bark?

Do we?

Originally, yeah.

So we're eating a lot more wood than we realised.

I like, you know, ants can't, most ants can't really digest solid food because they've got that really tiny waste.

They've got like smaller waist than Marilyn Monroe, so they have to liquefy their food before they digest it.

Oh, really?

I didn't know any of that.

What?

Ants can't digest lumps of food because...

No, I can imagine they can't eat like a donut because it's bigger than that.

But are you saying they can't have any kind of solid sort of thing?

They liquefy it, and the way that they liquefy it is they feed it to their larvae first.

So their larvae can digest solid food, can eat solid food.

So what ants do is they have the larvae and they will put it into their larvae's mouths and the larvae will eat this food and their stomachs will or their bodies will release the enzymes required to break it down into a more palatable smoothie type form and then they'll regurgitate it and give it to their parents.

So they're using the larvae like a blender.

Yeah, and

also like a plate, because some of the larvae, the larvae don't even eat it.

Some of the larvae just secrete the enzymes onto the top of their stomachs.

So the worker ants come back with solid food, drops the bit of food onto the larvae's stomach.

The larvae knows it just has to lie there, let it digest, and then the ant comes back a bit later and eats it off the larvae stomach.

Catfish stuff?

Yeah, yeah.

So catfish can

hunt in the dark by detecting the changes in acidity in water because their whiskers have got this special kind of sensor for acid.

So you can tell if something's a bit more acid or a bit less acid, and they can find things using that.

Just one more thing on a really cool species of wood-eating creature that's also underwater is a crab.

So there's this kind of crab which the only thing it can eat is wood, and yet it lives at the bottom of the ocean, so it can live up to 1.5 kilometers underwater, right?

So there are not many trees.

Not a lot of trees at all.

So there is nothing in its habitat that grows that it can possibly eat, and it has to rely on wood falling into the water.

Yeah, I mean, that is, yeah, it is mad that you've grow growing up in an environment where there's nothing for you to eat.

Imagine how annoying that would be.

So, so they have to literally just wait for trunks to find their way, and then suddenly that's their meal as a community for the next

and often trees break down as they get further and further into the sea, so you'll get little scraps of wood.

Or a shipwreck, yeah.

Some of them do live on shipwrecks, yeah.

Oh, that must be bliss when a huge ship wrecks.

Titanic was the best moment in their history.

We really made that one with a roast catfish.

There's an upside-down catfish.

What?

What?

They're found in central Congo, and they're notable because they swim upside down because they feed on insects on the surface of the water.

So they kind of just kind of backstroke their way through and just drop them off the surface.

And there are even ancient Egyptian paintings of them upside down.

But now I think maybe it was just a badly drawn

catfish.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shapes, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M and Chazinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, you can also go to no such thingasafish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes, and also go to no such thingasthenews.com, where we have all of our TV show episodes.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

Goodbye!

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